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FRONTIER EXPLORATION The Russian Chukchi Sea © NOAA With little seismic data, and no wells, the assessment of The Chukchi Sea belongs to the Arctic Ocean and In 2006, TGS-NOPEC Geophysical Company acquired 3600km of multi-client 2D seismic in the Russian the Russian Chukchi Sea depends largely on field work is bounded to the west by the Wrangel Island and and outcrop studies on the Chukotka Peninsula on the East Siberian Sea, to the south by northeastern Chukchi Sea in cooperation with Geophysical Solutions Integrator. The Chukchi Sea has an average northeastern shore of Siberia and the Wrangel Island in the Siberia and northwestern Alaska, to the east 2 Chukchi Sea. Here we see carbonates with minor clastic of by the Beaufort Sea, and to north by the Arctic water depth of 77m and comprises some 600,000 km when including the American part. The sea is Carboniferous age. Wrangel Island, Tsentran’nye Moun- continental slope. The Chukchi Sea sedimentary Photo: Vladimir Verzhbitsky navigable between July and October both eastward and westward from the shallow Bering Strait. tains, Khishchnikov head river. basins all lie on the North American plate. Southern flank of the North Chukchi basin 0.000 0.000 Miocene-QuaternaryMiocene-Quaternary 1.000 1.000 Paleocene-OligocenePaleocene-Oligocene 2.000 2.000 LowerLower CrCrCretaceousetaceous Upper Oligocene Oligocene (~24 Ma) (~24 Ma) (Aptian-Albian)-(Aptian-Albian)- Unconformity (?) (?) UpperUpper CretaceousCrCretaceous 3.000 3.000 Mid-BrookianMid-Brookian (Early(Early Tertiary, Tertiary, Paleocene,Paleocene, ~65-60 ~65-60 Ma) Ma) UnconformityUnconformity 4.000 4.000 5.000 5.000 SilurianSilurian (?)-Devonian(?)-Carboniferous-(?)-Devonian(?)-Carboniferous- LowerLower CretaceousCrCretaceous (Neocomian)(Neocomian) Buried Northern termination of Wrangel Arch Lower Cretaceous Unconformity (~130-125 Ma) Southern flank of the North Chukchi basin 36 GEO ExPro May 2008 Lower Cretaceous GEO ExPro May 2008 38 Buried Northern termination of Wrangel Arch Unconformity (~130-125 Ma).

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Flow of Pacific Water in the Western Chukchi
Deep-Sea Research I 105 (2015) 53–73 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Deep-Sea Research I journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/dsri Flow of pacific water in the western Chukchi Sea: Results from the 2009 RUSALCA expedition Maria N. Pisareva a,n, Robert S. Pickart b, M.A. Spall b, C. Nobre b, D.J. Torres b, G.W.K. Moore c, Terry E. Whitledge d a P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, 36, Nakhimovski Prospect, Moscow 117997, Russia b Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 266 Woods Hole Road, Woods Hole, MA 02543, USA c Department of Physics, University of Toronto, 60 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A7, Canada d University of Alaska Fairbanks, 505 South Chandalar Drive, Fairbanks, AK 99775, USA article info abstract Article history: The distribution of water masses and their circulation on the western Chukchi Sea shelf are investigated Received 10 March 2015 using shipboard data from the 2009 Russian-American Long Term Census of the Arctic (RUSALCA) pro- Received in revised form gram. Eleven hydrographic/velocity transects were occupied during September of that year, including a 25 August 2015 number of sections in the vicinity of Wrangel Island and Herald canyon, an area with historically few Accepted 25 August 2015 measurements. We focus on four water masses: Alaskan coastal water (ACW), summer Bering Sea water Available online 31 August 2015 (BSW), Siberian coastal water (SCW), and remnant Pacific winter water (RWW). In some respects the Keywords: spatial distributions of these water masses were similar to the patterns found in the historical World Arctic Ocean Ocean Database, but there were significant differences.
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